This update is probably the most expected: today Seeed Studio is officially opening orders for the minichord 🎉 🎉 🎉

The team at Seeed Studio worked hard to be able to offer the minichord as soon as possible and answer the many requests the I received. It will be available in a clean black and white colour scheme, for a retail price of $129. An initial batch has been manufactured then, depending on the volume of orders, more will fabricated month by month 📈.

To be able to attain that attractive price, some trade-offs had to be made regarding the marking of the buttons: while I CNC engraved them, this method was not scalable at a reasonable price. Seeed Studio had to use stickers instead. Also initially there will be only one colour available. I’ll circulate a poll in the coming weeks to identify the most wanted color schemes for future batches. In any case, minichords are easy to customise if you have a very specific color scheme in mind 🌈 !

With the production of the minichord taking shape, it is time for me to give a brief update on the project advancement 🗓️.

I have just received pre-production circuit boards from SeeedStudio and could confirm that they are perfectly functional 🎉. This is an important step towards release, and gives me great confidence in our ability to put the minichord on sale soon. There is still a few unknowns which could affect the release date or the final price, but less and less everyday.

In addition, I built and sent close to 15 minichords to artists around the world to beta test the project 🎸🎹. I got an overwhelming positive response and some useful feedbacks. Some of them were kind enough to record short videos of them using the minichord [1][2][3]. Even more kind, Hainbach published a video of the project, which, as a long time fan of his channel was a great honour 🤩.

As the year is coming to an end, here is some update on the minichord project. The bad news is that it won't be ready for the holidays, but the good news is that it is moving forward 🎉

Thanks to the incredible support, Seeedstudio was convinced to have a look at it and I am happy to announce that they received my prototypes and are currently assessing their capability to manufacture the minichord.

In addition, I've kept adding features, as you can see in the changelog at the end of this communication. The most important one is of course MIDI support!